Contributed by David Rhodes / In Peter Bradley’s third solo exhibition with Karma, all the paintings are from the previous 12 months, ranging in size from 36 inches square to 104 x 82 inches. They feature a thrilling abundance of color and paint, reaching the senses of both sight and touch. The regularity of the dimensions and emphasis on the square to rectangle format sharpens the comparative extremes within each painting. Lean, empty areas sometimes transition slowly, sometimes abruptly. Anomalous space – that is, pictorial space played off against real surface, canvas and paint – is always synchronous and flowing.
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Melora Kuhn: Refreshing myth
Contributed by Bill Arning / Museums and theaters are hard-pressed to introduce younger audiences to canonical works whose titles contain the word “rape.” Art history, drawn largely from the Bible and Greco-Roman mythology, is filled with images far more disturbing than most contemporary films. Renaissance works, for example, depict the Massacre of the Innocents: screaming infants being slaughtered in sprawling spectacles. Such works were intended to bring scripture vividly to life for largely illiterate audiences while satisfying the appetite for grand drama before cinema. Today, however, the digital world censors language in ways that often flatten historical nuance. Social-media algorithms routinely block “rape,” making it increasingly difficult to illuminate works such as Benjamin Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia, which accords the heroine profound dignity and moral courage. Contemporary audiences are shielded not only from discomfiting language but also from the complicated history it describes.
Griffin and Griffin: City lights
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The painter Nora Griffin, nonpareil chronicler of New York City, grew up in Noho as her father George conjured, as she puts it, “a sweeter version of R. Crumb’s debased Zap comix” and helped pave her way as an artist. Fierman’s current show “Time Café,” named for the restaurant that anchored the neighborhood, galvanically pairs the two, complementing Nora’s shrewdly lyrical paintings with George’s quizzical drawings, flip-books, and avant-garde cartoons. The result is a deeply plumbed sampling of 1970s and ‘80s New York and what it wrought, poised between nostalgic commemoration and acknowledged perpetuity – a duality reflected in Nora’s 2026 portrait of her father circa 1976, one profile looking reflective and the other anticipatory. Ultimately, both artists understand that any desperation in extending sentimentality to the city is likely unwarranted because its susceptibility to discomfitingly rapid change – the “New York minute” – is largely a myth, its past firmly embedded and there to see. Their mission, undertaken exuberantly, is to record it in context.
Where I Learned to See: On Backrooms, class, Cubism, and the church basement
Contributed by Brenda Zlamany / A few days before I saw Backrooms, I attended Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante and stayed for the Q&A, with Laurie Anderson leading a conversation with Schnabel and a few of the actors on stage. I walked into that theater in a raw, hyper-specific state of mind, very much thinking about time and memory. David Hockney had died, and I was operating in a state of quiet shock. I had spent that morning writing a remembrance for The Observer about my last painting of Hockney as Whistler’s Mother, realizing it had unexpectedly become a final goodbye, a sort of time and meaning shift. To sit in the dark grieving one great artist while watching another’s film about beauty, consciousness, and the survival of the imagination was overwhelming.
Tracey Emin, triumphant survivor
Contributed by David Carrier / Now and again, I have second thoughts about my initial strong response in an art exhibition. That was the case, in a way that deserves discussion, with “Tracey Emin: A Second Life” at the Tate Modern. In Britain, Emin is an art star. Before I went to this full-scale retrospective, I knew about her two seminal works – My Bed, her famously motley and putatively sordid installation, as well as Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, the tent incorporating the names of those thus described. With a life as eventful and stressed as Van Gogh’s, she has become a feminist hero. The subtitle of this show, “A Second Life,” alludes to her survival of devastating cancer surgery. In the wake of her friend David Hockney’s death, some are calling her the greatest living English painter.
Todd Stong: Probing art history
Contributed by Bill Arning / Philadelphia is having a moment as a city where artists can still afford to live and work. In an essay for the journal October, conceptual sculptor Josh Kline argued exhaustively that anyone hoping to sustain a creative life should give up on paying New York rents and move to Philly. It was a provocative suggestion. Philadelphia is close enough to Tribeca to spend an evening at an opening there and still be home in time to walk the dog, and the city offers teaching jobs and a far lower cost of living. The online debate was revealing: many commentators preferred the romance of sharing an apartment in Ridgewood to easy access to the Liberty Bell, Marcel Duchamp, and cheesesteaks.
Evolving horror at Management
Contributed by Patrick Bell / When the world stops making sense so does the body; the figure comes apart at the seams and becomes grotesque. “New Grotesque” at Management gathers 15 artists around this idea and the fact that the horror of the 2020s isn’t just lived but also streamed and thereby exaggerated and filtered. Where Bosch, Goya, and Ensor had war and plague of their own, a different kind of suffering is fed to us through the endless scroll. Management’s current show reflects the view that the grotesque has had to mutate to keep pace with the world. The distended, leaking forms here often make humans seem more like animals, machines, or meat than people.
Jihoon Cho: State and shadow
Contributed by Kenneth Greiner / Jihoon Cho, a South Korean-born artist-in-residence at WIP Space in Wandsworth, London, recently unveiled his latest spatial poem “Open Canopy” in the studio building’s gallery. It is above all an exhilarating environment. The four constituent works fall somewhere between Minimalist sculpture and architectural artifice, suggesting Cho’s preoccupation with his own rootlessness as an artist experiencing the unstable liminality of the immigration process.
Daniel Correa Mejía: Harmony and flow
Contributed by Will Maddoxx / Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about surface. Daniel Correa Mejía’s show “El amor se esconde como un animal salvaje” (“Love hides like a wild animal”) at P.P.O.W encouraged me to think harder. The paintings are oil on jute, and that surface’s rough, toothy quality is a very active ingredient in the viewing experience. Mejía himself responds to it with the same emotion – generally speaking, love – that his figures show one another. As the wispy jute falls back and comes forward, swirls, curves, and delicate brushstrokes cooperate. In El viaje de Pan, for instance, a small curl made by a thin stroke ensconces another curl rendered by the hair of the jute. It’s a quietly stunning effect.
Matthew Gilbert: Pick-up trucks, no pink carnations
Contributed by Bill Arning / Plunked in the middle of Matthew Gilbert’s solo exhibition “Pretend Till It Hurts” at Jane St. Art is a five-foot-tall steel construction crane buckling under the weight of a rented bouncy castle. Titled Until the Whole City Falls Over, the sculpture turns an ordinary suburban party rental into something strangely unsettling. Inflatable castles felt perfectly natural at children’s birthdays until Gilbert reminded us what castles actually are: military edifices built to withstand siege and slaughter.
Torild Stray: Between Bergen and Brooklyn, circuitously
Contributed by Patrick Neal / This time of year in Norway, the sun sets around 10 o’clock at night and rises at 3 a.m., and the day shifts from misty drizzles of rain to clear, sunny skies. Whether in a city or further afield, the country’s natural topography is stunningly beautiful. Fjords, carved out by glaciers, are placid, meandering and surrounded by steep cliffs. Waterfalls cascade and zigzag down mountains, and everywhere are bright green meadows and deep, forested hills and valleys. It’s no surprise that the painter, Torild Stray mentions these climatic factors as influential to her work. As someone who has straddled dramatic atmospheric conditions, and has divided her time between North America and northern Europe, Stray has absorbed the intercontinental shifts and characteristics of different cultures.
Two Coats of Paint Resident Artist Corrine Yonce, July 19–24, 2026
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In July, Two Coats of Paint welcomes Vermont artist and Visiting Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Middlebury College Corrine […]
NYC Selected Gallery Guide, July 2026
Contributed by Sharon Butler/ July and August are the slowest months for NYC galleries. Many limit summer hours to weekdays, and close early on Friday, so check and see when they are open before you go. A few galleries have announced that they are relocating or closing. In DUMBO, AIR Gallery and Platform Project Space lost their Two Trees space subsidies. AIR is relocating to Greenwich Village while Platform is closing as director Elizabeth Hazan moves her studio to Long Island City. Lyles & King, one of the oldest and most prominent of the Henry Street galleries, is also closing. Marinaro, after briefly sharing LES space with Candice Madey, has signed a lease at 86 Walker Street in Tribeca. Most readers will have heard that Pace is downsizing. On the bright side, Ruby/Dakota is back in business this month with pop-up shows at Kravets Wehby in Chelsea and Art Cake in Brooklyn. In general, look for a mix of…
Nancy Bowen: Language, the female body, traditional craft, and history
In connection with “Nancy Bowen: From A to Z and the Bodies In Between,” her solo exhibition at NUNU Fine Art, Two Coats of Paint arranged a conversation between Bowen and psychoanalyst-artist Laurence Hegarty about her practice. Approaching her work with an “artist-archaeologist” mindset, Bowen finds materials reassembles them into objects that challenge established narratives about language, the female body, traditional craft, and history. She indulges playfulness and unconscious impulses, letting social and political themes emerge in due course.
Hannah Studnick: A practice of persistence
Contributed by Lucas Moran / In early March, when another gallery seemed to disappear every few days, I opened Instagram to find Hannah Studnick’s dashboard confessional announcing that Ruby/Dakota was closing its doors. The speech wasn’t prewritten or staged – just a heartfelt message delivered from a dreary highway drive, the kind we take to mull things over, digest where our lives are headed, and reassess. Hannah turned the camera on herself, as she often does, and let the world in on who she was and what she was going through. Vulnerability isn’t unusual on Instagram, but it is in a gallerist.
Hudson Valley (+ Vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide, July 2026
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / The art scene was buzzing in June for Upstate Art Weekend, and it’s not slowing down in July. New exhibitions are opening throughout the month, starting on July 4 with Todd Stong: This World May Never Change at Headstone. On July 11, notable openings include Jason Middlebrook at LABspace, Reginald Madison at SEPTEMBER, Holly McCabe at Distortion Society, Going Upstate: The Avery Family in New York at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, and CANTILEVERS: Katy Fischer and Marie Lorenz at Roundabouts Now. If you are interested in collage, don’t miss the series of ten exhibitions organized by Transforming Collage: Hudson Valley, including Uncollage – Seamless Unison at Dutchess Community College; Shapeshifters: Collage to Form at Palmer Gallery, Vassar College; PLACE / MEANT at Millbrook Arts Project; and more. Finally, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States, One Mile Gallery in Kingston presents A Complicated Union: Art & Protest at America’s 250th Anniversary with a reception on July 18.
Idyll and crisis at The Re Institute
Contributed by Lawre Stone / The Re Institute – a dairy barn built in the 1960s that Henry Klimowicz has repurposed as rustic art gallery – seems to arise sublimely out of nowhere, exuding the freedom and wonder of the open road. Presently installed on the ground floor is “Seven Women Chase Icebergs” – paintings, drawings, and works on paper by seven women convened by Brenda Zlamany for a residency at Pouch Cove in northern Newfoundland in spring 2025 to respond to the remote landscape. The thrill of yielding to an unknown environment permeates the exhibition.
The Artist’s Soul: The Sorrows of Young Werther
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Two Coats of Paint Press recently published a limited edition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s semi-autobiographical, epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). I discovered the book when I was in my early thirties and ever since it’s lived in my brain. It’s among the first books to probe the inchoate longings of artists, and a powerful exploration of the subjective side of the artistic personality. I’ve met very few artists who have heard of it, let alone read it, so it surprised me to learn that a fellow artist had recently discovered it and published a special edition with a dedication reading, “To all the artists who have ever lived and worked in New York City.” Despite having been written more than two-and-a-half centuries ago, Werther raises provocative questions for artists working today.
David Fix, Jr.’s existential retrenchment
Contributed by Bill Arning / Comments at openings such as, “I just can’t look at another painting by a hot young artist showing off a dreamy life in Fire Island Pines” are all too familiar – “hot” referring to both the bronzed, gym-sculpted bodies on display and the artists’ meteoric careers. The field has become crowded enough that it now seems nearly impossible for a young gay painter, even one emerging from a prestigious MFA program, to develop a genuinely distinctive visual language. That is why David Fix, Jr.’s first solo exhibition, “The Cusp of Magic” at The Fireplace Project, is such a welcome surprise.
Peter Acheson: The edge of composure
Contributed by David Whelan / Peter Acheson’s paintings and sculptures live on the edge of composure through seemingly dashed-off operations, loose frameworks, and blurred boundaries. By making artwork with such a loose grip on solidity, Acheson invites us to step away from the known towards an enchanting oblivion. The title “Fifty Miles” comes from poet Gary Snyder’s response to the question of how famous he wanted to be: “Fifty miles seems about right”. Fifty miles is a human scale – not the span of global art fairs or finance but that of friendship, shared resources, and habitat. It is also roughly the distance between the gallery and the artist’s studio, which put a smile on my face. The show is curated by Teffia Primary and hosted at Maiden Lane Gallery, an old two-story building full of oddball characteristics. The space is connected to the local YWCA, whose preschool playground can be seen from the second-floor window, reminding us we are in a space of growth and play.










































